Document processing facilities often use high speed document processing machines such as sorters, to sort and direct mail items appropriately to one or more mail bins for distribution. The efficiency of a sorter is generally dependent upon various factors, one of which is the rate at which mail items can be fed by a feeder system as input onto the sorter's transport path. Typical feeder systems employ one or more motor driven belts in combination with a set of picker fingers, advance paddles or other means to progressively advance a plurality of mail items onto the transport path. Moreover, the feeder operates based on one or more feeder control settings, such as a specified gap or pitch threshold between successive mail items, vacuum suction pressure to be applied for feeding of items onto the transport, belts motor acceleration/deceleration rates, retard belt speed, etc. The more expedient the input of the mail items by the feeder system in conjunction with the aforementioned combination of factors and control elements, the more expeditiously the sorter can process mail items.
Of course, a typical sort operation may require the input and eventual processing of thousands of mail items, where a specific mailing or group of items requiring process may belong to a particular customer. In fact, it is not uncommon for a sort processing environment to process multiple different mailings for different customers on a single sort processing device within a typical operating day. To the extent the differing customer mailings vary by item size or type, material type, processing requirements, etc.—the feeder control settings of the feeder system must be adjusted accordingly on a per customer basis. Unfortunately, typical feeder systems must be manually adjusted at the time of a customer changeover, such as via an instrument panel operable in connection with the sorter or via a graphical user interface based platform. So, for example, the operator may adjust a control knob from the instrument panel that increases or decreases belt speed, gap length, etc. associated with the feeder system. This is essentially a “trial-and-error” or “tuning” based approach to calibration of the feeder system as it is performed typically by execution of a test run. In other instances, the feeder system may be set to operate in accord with a few pre-determined feeder modes (e.g., pitch feeder mode, gap feeder mode, gap and pitch feeder mode). Of course, these pre-determined settings may themselves require additional tuning to accommodate different mailings—one size of feeder mode does not fit all customer, site or job requirements. Either way, the operator inherently defines or establishes the feeder settings manually.
There is currently no means for automating the association and loading of a particular feeder system profile for affecting a feeder system prior to the run of a particular customer mailing (job) to be processed, so as to avoid the manual tasks mentioned above. Furthermore, there is currently no means for enabling an association between feeder control settings and a particular customer mailing based on differing processing contexts. For example, Feeder Profile 1 relative to Customer 1 for usage at Site 1 may not be suited for usage at a Site 2 as the sites may feature differing machines and other resources to which the feeder profile must be suited. Feeder profile adaptation relative to the specific machine, job and/or site in which the mailing is being processed is necessary to avoid manual adaptation and increase mail production and processing capability.